The Japanese warlord Mōri Terumoto was a direct ancestor, and it had long been the standard practice in his family to include the character "teru" (輝) in male names.

[2] Hanada moved to Tokyo and became a journalist for the Gunji Kōgyō Shimbun, a pro-government military-industrial economic newspaper, and received financial backing from his idol Nakano.

However, during World War II, Hanada published numerous essays that were highly critical of the government and the growth of Japanese militarism in the literary magazine Bunka Soshiki, which he founded in 1939.

Hanada was also the founder of the Yoru no Kai ("The Night Society"), which included the likes of artist Tarō Okamoto, Kōbō Abe, and critic Ichirō Hariu.

In 1954, Communist loyalists managed to have Hanada fired as editor-in-chief of the JCP-linked literary journal New Japan Literature (Shin Nihon Bungaku) when he rejected a manuscript submitted by senior party official Kenji Miyamoto.